Tony sips a brandy and
considers his cards.
In London in 1864, the
world of the Gentlemen’s Club was everything you’d expect of a Victorian
hierarchy – the clubs were exclusive, and yet intensely acquisitive of the most
‘clubbable gentlemen’ – leaders in their fields, so long as those fields were respectable
or could be made to appear so by the transfer of large endowments. They were
secret, private places, where very often, little went on bar the regression of
the nation’s leading men into enclaves of even greater comfort and
congratulation than they encountered in their daily lives. They were places to
which one escaped from the cares of the world, from the nagging of one’s wife,
from the demands of one’s family, from the pursuit of energetic pleasures.
Places where one could sit with other chaps, have a tolerably good dinner, a
smoke and a drink in convivial male company, perhaps play a game of cards and
simply be oneself with one’s friends. They were essentially privately policed
jewel-boxes of masculine, conventional pleasure.
As such, you can see why
the idea of them gave writer Phil Mulryne the idea to base a Doctor Who story
inside the walls of such a club. Within the walls of a Gentlemen’s Club, what
you have is a world enclosed, divorced from the law and order, divorced, should
it want to be, from the morals and ethics of the outside world. So long as the
secrecy of your members about what went on inside could be guaranteed, then
technically anything could happen in a Gentlemen’s Club.
When the Fifth Doctor,
bless him, decides that he’s been trying and failing to get to Heathrow Airport
for too damned long, and maybe, just maybe, something’s deliberately trying to
stop him, the Tardis ‘falls out’ of the vortex in the newly-established hottest
club in London – the Contingency Club. In itself, that would be nothing to
worry about, though it would need an explanation. But the first scene of
Mulryne’s new story makes it clear that all is not strictly gentlemanly in the
Contingency Club – who or what, for instance, is the mysterious ‘Red Queen’ to
whom members must swear allegiance as part of their initiation? And why, come
to that, does that initiation have to take place while in a mesmeric trance?
What is it about the Club that requires that kind of deep obedience and
secrecy…?
At first glance, nothing,
it seems, but Mulryne’s no fool when it comes to plotting – within the first
episode, he gives us half a handful of things to worry about: a member who’s
gone missing from the rest of the world, the reason why the Contingency has
such swift at-seat service, and how Nyssa and Tegan can stand inside it without
causing a riot being just some of them. When a degree of hell breaks out in the
Club, the traditional burden of the ‘full Tardis’ is neatly tackled, the Doctor
and Tegan being forcibly ejected and literally bumping into a man with a
somewhat unhealthy interest in becoming a member, while Nyssa and Adric equally
literally run into the daughter of the missing member, and decide to go
swanning about in some subterranean tunnels.
Word to the wise – never
go swanning about in subterranean Victorian tunnels if you can help it. You can
hide armies down there, and of course, many species have done over the
centuries of Who-lore. The latest of
them at least explain one of the Contingency’s unique selling points as a place
of relaxation for discerning gentlemen. But as the drama unfolds, you get less
interested in running away from things, even things as persistent as what’s
down in the tunnels, because there are more interesting central things going
on. For neither the first nor the last time, Big Finish’s contact book puts
many TV drama companies to shame. The much-vaunted Red Queen is played by
Lorelei King with a relish that makes the character more than just what she
appears – and she already appears to be plenty. There are elements of the name,
the plotting, and the personification of the character that punch through from
the situation in which (ahem) King’s Queen finds herself to other great popular
fiction, and that for an agreeable while makes Who-fans think of beings we’ve
seen that had similar needs for diversion much earlier in the show’s history.
It would be certainly true that, to borrow from Lewis Carroll, the Red Queen is
‘the cause of all the mischief’ in the story, and as in any good game of chess,
there are two queens at play in this story – and a king to boot, as well as a
seeming army of pawns and at least one bishop on either side of what is laid
out like a battlefield of hidden mines, Mulryne being unafraid to present
several levels of his storytelling at once. That’s one of the most impressive
points about the scripting of this story – it moves at a thrumming pace, and
then, while it’s moving, and you’re dancing around in Victorian circles trying
to find the lady, the whole thing grows and separates, adding dimensions as it
moves. The cast also brings in two of Britain’s best character actors in key
roles – Philip Jackson as Mr Peabody, the nominal secretary of the Club, and
the ever-joyous Clive Merrison as Mr George Augustus, he who wants in to the
Club, but can’t get an invite. King, Merrison, Jackson and Alison Thea-Kott as
Marjorie Stonegood, the daughter with the tunnel-fixation, raise the game of
this release even above usual Big Finish standards, and the joy is that they
take roles that Mulryne has made rich and fully-fleshed.
You want extra joy? Not a
problem, because here’s the weirdest thing about these characters – yes,
they’re rich, yes, they’re fully-fleshed, and yes, every single one of the
actors knocks them out of the park, but they also maintain a degree of mystery
about what’s actually going on that lets at least a few of them spin forward to
potential future adventures. And we want them – we want to know more about the
Red Queen and the gambit she’s involved in here. We want to hear what she does
next, and we want to know more about her genuine opponent in this story. More
Mulryne, more Red Queen, whole different story to follow up, please Big Finish.
Oh, and yes, in case
you’re wondering, there’s a valid reason the Tardis falls out of the vortex.
And while it starts out as an oddity, the reason turns out to be central to the
resolution of events at the Contingency Club.
The Contingency Club is
one of those Big Finish stories that’s actually a symphony – it starts like
Mozart, barely anything, and then grows and swells, beyond anything you imagine
it has the wings to do. Mulryne’s script is cleverer than you imagine, and
richer, and the combination of the casting and the direction by Barnaby Edwards
turns it into exactly what the Gentlemen’s Clubs were – an exquisite puzzle
box, a beautifully upholstered mystery, and a time capsule against the outside
world.
Get The Contingency Club
today and lock yourself in. You’re going to love it.
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